Waltz with Bashir

The wisdom of serving an arrest warrant on the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir has been debated for well over a year. Not because anyone seriously doubts his involvement in war crimes in Darfur. The debate has been between the realists and the moralists: those who argue that the warrant will imperil the very people on whose behalf the case has been brought and those who say that recourse to international justice is their only protection. Has there been a peace process worthy of the name, let alone one that could be scuppered by an arrest warrant?

The international criminal court yesterday threw out three counts of genocide. It was always going to be difficult to prove that Bashir consistently pursued a policy of eradication against the Darfuris for four years. But the counts for which the court in The Hague did find sufficient grounds (war crimes, crimes against humanity, murder and forcible displacement) are grave enough to severely curtail the president's travel plans.

The record of the ICC in Africa has been mixed. To say that it is anti-African because all four of the court's active investigations are in Africa ignores the fact that three of the countries involved (Central African Republic, Congo and Uganda) called the prosecutor in, as Desmond Tutu wrote this week. Having started the process against Joseph Kony and four other commanders of the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni's government argued with Britain that pursuing the warrants would imperil an amnesty and peace talks. The talks collapsed anyway, and the ICC have not got their men. The pursuit of Charles Taylor was more successful but only because Taylor had already fled Liberia.

Bashir has said the ICC could eat its arrest warrant and, ominously, the aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières pulled its expatriate staff out of Darfur on the orders of the government. But whether Bashir will want to turn his guns against aid workers is another matter. There are simmering tensions in the ruling National Congress party over the tactics he has pursued and there is an election this year. The ICC could push the ruling party into a more isolationist stance but it could also give the pragmatists inside pause for thought, particularly those worried about their oil revenues.

The ICC is right to push ahead with the warrant, because it is another lever over a regime that has defied all others. International justice has to be supported, but the harder that Washington pushes for this action, the less it can plead sanctity from the ICC's writ. What is good for the president of Sudan must also be good for the president of the United States. International justice is not for small countries only.